The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Machine-Type Communication (MTC) is a promising and emerging technology. Potential MTC based applications include smart metering, healthcare monitoring, remote security surveillance, intelligent transportation system, etc. These services and applications stimulate the design and development of a new type of MTC device that may need to be integrated into current and next generation mobile broadband networks such as LTE and LTE-Advanced.
The existing mobile broadband networks were designed to optimize performance mainly for human type of communications and thus are not optimized for MTC specific requirements. For instance, some MTC devices may be installed in basements of residential buildings. These devices may experience significantly greater penetration losses on the radio interface than normal LTE devices. In order to provide sufficient coverage of such MTC devices, special coverage enhancement considerations may be needed for various physical channels.